The rumours are true (no, not those): in March 2016 Pocket Gamer is officially 10 years old.

Sometime back in March 2006 the founding fathers of Steel Media popped a cork (see accompanying photo for proof!) and unleashed a brand new site to the quite literally tens of adoring fans. We’ve been writing news, reviews and features about mobile games since the very foundation of the industry.

This means when the likes of Rovio, Gameloft and Glu were creating games for feature phones controlled by a numeric keypad (ask your parents kids) with little love or money in return, we helped promote them on operator portals, our site and in our PG high-street magazine (again, ask your parents kids).

When plucky upstart Apple tried to shake things up with a touchscreen device and its own store, our own app celebrated the arrival of a whole new wave of awesome games from studios like Lima Sky, Halfbrick, Firemint, and ZeptoLab.

We even took the time out to listen to the crazy guys at Supercell, King, and Natural Motion who wanted to give their games away for free, and let them share their crazy ideas on our b2b channel and at our networking events.

We’re super proud of the way mobile has become a $35 billion giant and the biggest and fastest growing part of the entire games industry, and in some small way, we like to think that we’ve played our part.

Over the years we’ve grown that one site into a network including the likes of 148Apps, AndroidRundown, QualityIndex, BestAPpEver Awards, and AppSpy, as well as an extended network of partner sites reaching over 40M mobile gamers a month. We’ve established popular channels on YouTube and Twitch, our own partner apps for leading games, plus award-winning (but sadly lamented) digital magazine Swipe.

We’ve grown the leading industry b2b website PocketGamer.biz and spun-off projects like the annual Top 50 game developer guide.

In the real world we’ve brought the industry together with some of the best pitches, networking events, and parties all over the world – from Brighton, Barcelona, and Beijing to Cologne, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

And most recently we’ve launched PG Connects, the biggest and best dedicated mobile conferences in the western world in Helsinki, London, Bangalore, and soon Vancouver.

Suffice to say we have plenty more plans to come, but to celebrate a decade in this amazing business, we’re putting together a month of activity including features, competitions, and birthday parties across our sites and events from March 10th to April 10th 2016.

Before we crack on though I’d personally like to say a few thank yous.

None of this would have been possible without my fellow founders and incredible team (both present and past) who’ve worked tirelessly to make all our projects a reality.

And obviously none of this would be possible without the awesome game developers, publishers, tool-makers and monetisation experts who make the industry world go round and have supported us over the years by sharing their news, attending our events, or sponsoring our activities.

I’d especially like to thank the awesome folks who have extended their support to sponsor this 10th anniversary celebration – so a big shout out to Gram Games, JoyCity, Gamevil, Nordeus, and Rovio.